Alternate Rise
Table of Contents *Alternate Rise/Hedrons *Alternate Rise/Eldrazi *Alternate Rise/Eldrazi Spells *Alternate Rise/Colorless Enchantments *Alternate Rise/Armors *Alternate Rise/Staves *Alternate Rise/White *Alternate Rise/Black *Alternate Rise/Green Introduction to Rise of the Eldrazi set The recent set "Rise of the Eldrazi" (2010) has definitely delivered on its promise of amazing Magic players with its awesome large collection of 233 new cards (plus a new kind of token card). Massive creatures the likes of which the Magic multiverse rarely sees, showing up in the uncommon rarity and some even at common, towering over battlefields and leaving a path of destruction. Smaller creatures fighting against immense odds and gradually leveling up to become powerful in their own right, sometimes even to be able to face down an Eldrazi. Since the Eldrazi are so powerful, they have exceedingly high mana costs and Eldrazi Spawn have been introduced as a means of quickly collecting the mana you need to play them. Six races each do their best to fight the Eldrazi and take back their homeland of Zendikar: Humans, elves, merfolk, goblins, vampires, and the Kor, a race that has made a home for itself on this dangerous world. As some of the designers at Wizards of the Coast have put it, the set has "battlecruiser magic" at its core: large, bulky creatures that would ordinarily be too unwieldy in the usually volatile world of Magic survive long enough to dish out the damage, and removal spells are painful to cast so that the Eldrazi aren't toppled over by a simple Terminate spell. Some tried and true cards from previous sets return in Rise, while the set advertisement primarily focuses on the sheer awesomeness of the Eldrazi, which are given clear-background cards. Alternate Rise It can truly be said that one not at Wizards of the Coast could not have predicted what the set would have turned out to be a month or two back. What could the developers have done differently, or to put it another way, what would the set have looked like had another set of people developed Rise? Sure, once the set theme had been established some of the ideas would likely be present no matter who designed it, but there are of course many finer details that could have changed. I took this opportunity to design my own, alternate set of Rise of the Eldrazi, based loosely on the following: #Eldrazi are big and powerful: We know that at least about these giants. Of course, powerful could be interpreted in many different ways. In Rise, this was primarily demonstrated by the Annihilator mechanic (whenever you attacked with an Eldrazi artifact creature, defending player had to sacrifice a certain number of permanents regardless of whether his or her defenses held) and, of course, an incredibly high power and toughness. #Levelers: This affectionate term for creatures that level up when you pay a specified amount of mana using the Level up mechanic (pay mana to put a level counter on the creature). Levelers in Rise were still competitive the moment you played them (usually turns one to three) despite their ability to become much stronger later in the game. The idea here was that as long as you had enough mana you could keep leveling up these creatures, and once they reached a certain threshold they would become better in some way related to the color or "feel" of the card. In order to convey this, Wizards designed a new style of card that had three tiers, one for the initial creature, one for the first level threshold, and one for the second level threshold. Because levelers had option value built into them, and because unused mana was essentially wasted, the level up mechanic was quite mana-inefficient. #Six races: Each of the six races mentioned earlier (Humans, elves, merfolk, goblins, vampires, and the Kor) participate in the war against the Eldrazi, though apparently they did so without uniting, since Rise features next to no multicolor creatures. Each race has different kinds of magic available at its disposal. In my alternate version of Rise of the Eldrazi, I kept the above three aspects constant while changing many others. I crafted a different storyline, a different "feel" if you will, about the world of Zendikar after the big lumbering beasts have been unleashed. I gave each of the races a decidedly different role in the war, and added flavor text to suit. For simplicity's sake I have left out the pictures, though I have used some of the more popularized Rise images on the cards with clear backgrounds. Category:Sets